We’ve decided to let the rest of the world in on a few of our inside jokes. That’s why we’re rolling out our 2014 Insider T-Shirts for the upcoming recruiting season. We’ll have these two shirts (while supplies last!) at university career fairs around Georgia (including Georgia Tech, Georgia State, and University of West Georgia). Now let’s get to the stories:

“Beware the LEFT HAND KNAVE”

Feels quaint or even a bit archaic, doesn’t it? A sneaky knave slinking around the village, snatching up things that don’t belong to him, dissolving into a dark alley. Pantaloons? Yes. Here’s what we mean:

We had an initiative to clean up the data that drives the left-hand navigation on our website (faceted product data-driven navigation). It was a long and tedious process de-duping attributes, researching which data points mattered the most to our customers, and cleaning up the tables where the data lived. During those trying times, we plastered these flyers around the office.

Luckily, our story does have a happy ending: the UX and Merchandising teams were able to reign in dirty product data, cleaning up faceted navigation across the site. Huzzah! And the village lived happily ever after.

“Don’t FAQ with Tony Choi”

Some claim Tony Choi was the best damn employee to ever step foot at SUPPLY.com HQ – that he could single-handedly assemble a 60 foot warehouse rack in an hour flat. Some say Tony Choi stood at least 8 feet tall, his moustache blowing in the Georgia breeze. Some believe Tony Choi to be as real as the daily sunrise. Still others ne’er saw his face, calling him the Keyser Söze of SUPPLY.com. Whether he truly does exist or not, we may never know.

Uncertainty abounding, this adventurer wasn’t satisfied. I set out searching high and low through the office space and showroom… looking for something, anything to shed some light on this mystery man. Months of searching yielded only red herring and speckled trout. Then, everything changed one early December morning during a company-wide inventory project in the warehouse. There I stood, high among the racks of products on my picker when I finally saw an inscription. See photo to the left.

He IS real. Very real. After documenting my discovery that fateful morning, I made it my life’s work to promulgate his legend. So that all might know of the majesty of our very own John Henry. And as it does, one thing’s for certain: we don’t ask questions.

We might not be a hit Netflix show, but some of our “things” are definitely stranger, and we’re supernaturally good at what we do. We love making cool content for our company and the plumbing supply industry – check out more of our things here.